Introduction

Janet Malcolm is an award-winning American writer and journalist and the author of more than ten books, including the much revered, The Journalist and the Murderer.

But it is Malcolm’s 2013 collection, Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers that we’re discussing today. The collection, much of which was first published in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, features sixteen essays on artists and writers as diverse as Virginia Woolf, Julia Margaret Cameron, JD Salinger, Edith Wharton and Cecily von Ziegesar.

Malcolm has been described as ‘among the most intellectually provocative of authors, able to turn epiphanies of perception into explosions of insight.’ With her books bringing a ‘gimlet-eyed clarity to often fraught and complicated subjects and are so lean, so seamless, so powerfully direct, that read as they read as if they have been written in a single breath’